Audio books - albert einstein - physics of illusion

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Einstein's Physics Of Illusion

This essay was delivered by John Dobson as a lecture at the Vedanta Society,

Berkeley, USA, on 12th October 1980 and has been reprinted from:

The Vedanta Kesari

May, 1988 (pages 181-189)

Some of you may think from the title "Einstein's Physics of Illusion", that I'm going to talk about the

physics which underlies what we think of as magic. That is not what I expect to talk about. Some of you

may think that I suspect that Einstein had some special physics of illusions. If he did, I don't know

anything of it. Instead, what I want to do, with Einstein's help, is to trace our physics all the way back to

square one, and to find out whether, underlying it, there may possibly be something akin to magic.

George Valens has written a charming book called The Attractive Universe. It is subtitled "Gravity and

the Shape of Space", and on the very first page he says that when a ball is thrown straight up, after a

while it comes to a stop, changes its direction and comes back. He says it looks like magic, and probably

it is. Now what he is taking for granted is that it should have gone off on a straight path without any

change in speed or direction. But you see, that also would have been the result of magic. We do not

understand in physics why the ball comes back. But we also do not understand in our physics why the

ball should have continued without any change in the direction of its speed.

Now in the title, and in the remarks that I have made so far, what I mean by magic or illusion is

something like what happens when, in the twilight, you mistake a rope for a snake. And this sort of thing

was analyzed very carefully by some people in North India long, long ago, and they said that when you

make such a mistake there are three aspects to your mistake. First, you must fail to see the rope rightly.

Then, instead of seeing it as a rope, you must see it as something else. And finally, you had to see the

rope in first place or you never would have mistaken it for" a snake. You mistook it for a snake because

the rope was three feet long, and you're accustomed to three foot long snakes.

But before I speak further about illusion, I want to say a few words about what we do understand in

physics, and I also want to point out a few gaps in that understanding. When we talk about the universe,

or when we look out and see it, what we see is that the universe is made out of what we call matter. It's

what we call a material universe. And what we want to do, first of all, is to trace that material back, not

quite to square one, but to square two at least, We want to find out whether we can think of all these

things which we see as being made out of matter, as really being made out of only a few ingredients.

And the answer is that we can. Long ago the chemists pointed out that all these things that we see are

made out of not more than 92 ingredients. Those are the 92 chemical elements of the periodic table. It

was suggested in 1815 that all those different chemical elements are probably made out of hydrogen.

That was Prout's hypothesis, because in those days no one knew how to do it. But now, in modern times,

Einstein's Physics Of Illusion

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we do know how to do it, and we do know that that's what happens. All the other chemical elements

are made out of hydrogen, and it happens in the stars"

The universe, even as it is today, consists mostly of hydrogen. And what it is doing is falling together in

the gravitational field. It falls together to galaxies and stars, and the stars are hot. Falling together by

gravity is what makes them hot. And they get hot enough inside so that the hydrogen is converted

to.helium. Now helium is a very strong atomic nucleus, and so the main line in building up the atoms of

the atomic table goes this way: First, four hydrogens make one helium. Then three heliums make one

carbon. Two heliums won't stick. That would be beryllium-8. There is no beryllium-8. It won't last. But

three heliums will stick, and that's carbon. Four is oxygen. Five is neon. That's the way it goes in the

stars; the other nuclei are built of helium nuclei. Six makes magnesium. Then silicon, sulfur, argon,

calcium, titanium, chromium and iron.

In big stars it goes like this. But in small stars like our sun it goes only up to carbon or possibly carbon

and oxygen. That's where our sun will end, at about the size of the earth, but with a density of about four

concrete mixing trucks in a one pint jar. Larger stars get too hot by their own gravitational squeeze, and

the carbon cannot cool off like that. They go right on to oxygen and so on, until they get, in the center, to

iron. Now iron is the dumbest stuff in the universe. There is no nuclear energy available to iron --

nothing by which it can fight back against gravitational collapse; so gravity collapses it, this time to the

density of a hundred thousand airplane carriers squeezed into a one pint yogurt box One hundred

thousand airplane carriers in a one pint box! And, when it collapses like that, the gravitational energy that

is released to other forms blows the outer portions of the star all over the galaxy. That's the stuff out of

which our bodies are made. Our bodies are all made out of star dust from such exploding stars.

We do know that the main ingredient of the universe is hydrogen and that the main usable energy in the

universe is gravitational. We know that the name of the game is falling together by gravity (hydrogen,

falling together by gravity), but what we don't know is why things fall together by gravity. We do know

that the stuff out of which this universe is made is hydrogen, but we do not know from where we get

the hydrogen. We know that the hydrogen is made of electrical particles, protons and electrons, and we

know that the total electrical charge of the universe is zero, but we do not know, you see, why it is made

of electricity. We do not know why it falls together. And we do not know why, when things are

moving, they should coast. There are these gaps in our understanding. We know how things coast. We

know how things fall. We know how the electrical particles behave, but we don't know any of the why

questions. We don't have any answers to the why questions.

What I want to talk about next is a discovery made by Albert Einstein when he was 26 years old and

working in the patent office in Bern. Then I want to talk about the" consequences of that discovery and,

through that, I want to trace our physics back, if possible, to answer those why questions.

Einstein noticed that we cannot have an objective universe in three dimensions. We all talk about 3-D.

Hardly anybody talks about 4-D. But the universe is 4-D. It is not possible to have a universe of space

without a universe of time. It is not possible to have space without time, or time without space, because

space and time are opposites. I don't know that Einstein ever used the language that space and time are

opposites, but if you look at his equations, it is very, very clear that that's exactly what they are. If,

between two events, the space separation between them is the same as the time separation between them,

then the total separation between them is zero. That's what we mean by opposites in this case. In

electricity if we have the same amount of plus charges as we have of minus charges, say in the same

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Einstein'sPhysicsOfIllusionCopyright©1980byJohnDobsonThisessaywasdeliveredbyJohnDobsonasalectureattheVedantaSoci\ety,Berkeley,USA,on12thOctober1980andhasbeenreprintedfrom:TheVedantaKesari May,1988(pages181-189)Someofyoumaythinkfromthetitle"Einstein'sPhysicsofIllusion",t\hatI'mgoingtotalkaboutthephys...

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